Star Tribune
Derek Chauvin survives Arizona federal prison attack; stabbing raises security questions
Derek Chauvin has survived a stabbing at an Arizona federal prison, law enforcement officials said Saturday, raising immediate questions about why Minnesota’s most notorious inmate was vulnerable to attack and what should be done to protect him in the future.
The former Minneapolis police officer has been imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson for killing George Floyd while on duty in 2020. As of Saturday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had not formally confirmed Chauvin was attacked by a fellow inmate a day earlier at the medium-security facility, but law enforcement leaders in Minnesota said they were officially notified he was.
A spokesman for Attorney General Keith Ellison, who decried the attack, said Saturday morning that Chauvin was “expected to survive.” Brian Evans said Ellison’s office had no further information about Chauvin’s stabbing, which was being investigated by the FBI.
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, which like the FBI is under the Justice Department, declined to respond to questions or provide additional details about the attack, what led up to it or where Chauvin was being kept. The bureau said in a statement Friday night that the inmate in question had been taken to a hospital.
“I have not heard from the Bureau of Prisons at all,” Chauvin’s attorney, William Mohrman, said Saturday. He said his office has tried to the contact the prisons bureau “regarding the media reports of an attack on Mr. Chauvin, and we have not heard anything back.”
Chauvin, 47, has been serving a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22 ½-year state sentence for second-degree murder. Floyd, who was Black, died in May 2020 while pinned under the knee of Chauvin, who is white, at the corner of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street in south Minneapolis. Floyd’s death ignited days of protests and riots.
In August 2022, Chauvin was transferred from Minnesota to the Arizona prison, which has 382 inmates, according to its website. The prison has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages, according to the Associated Press.
“He doesn’t deserve any extra punishment. I’m upset about this,” Ellison said in an interview Friday night after he was briefed on the attack.
One Minnesota corrections official, who declined to speak for attribution, said Chauvin would likely be housed in a special section of any prison — whether in Arizona or Minnesota.
“It would be standard practice that he would be separated from the general population, especially someone who is high profile and especially in a case with national prominence,” the corrections official said.
“It’s not clear to me how this happened.”
Chauvin’s attorneys long advocated for separating him from the general population to protect his safety.
While awaiting sentencing, he was kept in solitary confinement for more than six months at Oak Park Heights prison, Minnesota’s high-security prison.
Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson, who issued Chauvin’s federal sentence, said he had intended to request that Chauvin be imprisoned at a location close to family members in Iowa and Minnesota. But Magnuson acknowledged it was not his final decision to make, and Chauvin ended up in Tucson.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Chauvin’s latest attempt to vacate his murder conviction. The week before that, Chauvin separately argued in court filings that he would not have pleaded guilty in his federal case if his then-attorney had informed him that a pathologist had offered to testify that Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death.
The facility housing Chauvin is part of a federal correctional complex in Tucson that includes a high-security prison and a minimum-security camp. In November 2022, an inmate at the prison camp reportedly obtained a gun and tried to shoot a visitor in the head.
Chauvin is the latest high-profile inmate to be attacked at a federal prison. In July, convicted sex offender and former Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed repeatedly at a facility in Florida.
In 2018, former Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was killed shortly after being transferred to a federal prison in West Virginia. A Justice Department report late last year excoriated the West Virginia prison’s management for Bulger’s death.
A series of Associated Press reports in 2022 found that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has long been plagued by staffing shortages, chronic violence, inmate deaths and sexual abuse of prisoners by staff.
Star Tribune staff writer Rochelle Olson contributed to this report.
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
